February 13, 2022

Rudy Giuliani’s harmonies – An election of octogenarians – Our younger generations being squeezed out – COVID continues to decline – A determined city mayor – Evening statistics

Some days ago Rudy Giuliani was unmasked as an exiting costumed contestant in a taping of the first Season 7 episode of Fox’s popular primetime series “The Masked Singer.”  This event aroused considerable criticism, to the extent of causing a couple of the contest judges to walk out in protest.  It may, however, have been an act of foreshadowing.  In the slang of the gulag, according to Aleksandr Solzhenistyn, a “singer” is someone who, when questioned by authorities, has no hesitation in providing incriminating testimony against others in order to save his own skin.  Giuliani is currently in discussions with the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Time will tell to what extent he is willing to “sing” on this occasion.

If there is any doubt that both of our main political parties are moribund, that doubt must be dispelled by the current prognostics for the 2024 Presidential election.  Both Trump and Biden are the forerunners for the Republican and Democratic candidates respectively, although Trump will be 77 years old in 2024 and Biden will be 81.  It seems incredible that one party, let alone both of them, is willing to put up a candidate well past his prime and, in the cases of Trump and Biden alike, arguably in his dotage.  The word “senate” is derived from the Roman word “senex,” meaning “elder” or “old man”; but I believe that even the ancient Romans would be astounded by this monopoly of national government by geriatrics.  Our Senate is truly a collection of seniors:  over half of them are 65 or older.  When Ronald Reagan ran for re-election in 1984, his age at the time was the source of numerous jokes and it was considered to be a severe disqualification by many.  At the age of 73, he would have been considered a callow youth by today’s standards.  We are currently in the situation that prevailed in 19th century France at the tail-end of the Bourbon Restoration.  In 1827, the sociologist Baron Charles Dupin calculated that about one-ninth of Frenchmen were over the age of 57, but that they constituted about half of the “political nation.”  Balzac’s verdict in “Les Filles des Yeux d’Or,” of life being reduced to a battle between “a wan and colorless youth and a senility bedizened in the attempt to look young,” is every bit as true of the U.S. today as it was of France two hundred years ago.

It was not always so.  Kennedy was 43 when he took office, Lyndon Johnson was 54, Bill Clinton was 48, even Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were in their early 60s.  At what point did our two main parties decide that the hands of governments must be hands afflicted with palsied senility?

The United States reported a daily average of less than 180,000 new COVID-19 cases, down 67% over 14 days.  At this point every state and territory has seen a decrease in cases.  COVID hospitalizations also continue to fall.  Various states are lifting restrictions.  New York has already lifted the state’s “mask-or-vaccine” requirement for indoor businesses.  On Feb. 28th Illinois will lift its indoor mask mandate and Massachusetts will lift a mask requirement for schools.  The decline is worldwide as well as national, with a 1% decrease in deaths and a 19% decrease in hospitalizations over the past week.

James Butts, the mayor of Inglewood, CA, a city in the Los Angeles complex, is determined that it will not undergo the fate of Ottawa, and has said so in the bluntest possible terms.  In response to threats of a trucker convoy protest, the city of Inglewood and security forces have been put on high alert.  The truckers, Butts added, “‘wouldn’t be able to do it because the trucks would be towed away immediately. Let me be very clear . . . their vehicles would be towed immediately and it would cost them a lot of money.”

Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide:  412,076,898; # of deaths worldwide: 5,833,903; # of cases U.S.: 79,325,576; # of deaths; U.S.: 943,411.